The visionary behind the Glass & Garden Drive-In Church is the pastor Floyd Goulooze, now (in 2006) 77 years old, the subject of a good article in the Scottdale Republic on the church's 40th anniversary.

To make the story short, Goulooze came to Scottsdale from Lakewood California in 1963 and made a bet on the city's growth eastward, so he commissioned a 1400-seat circular church building with a drive-in facility, complete with drive-in-movie speakers, where there were only seven and a half acres of cotton fields before, so parishioners could get churched up in the comfort of their own automobiles.

Designed by an architect named E. Logan Campbell.

This was a bad bet. There is an Indian reservation in the way, so the city couldn't grow that direction -- until recently. The church more or less thrived anyway all these years, with sermons broadcast out over AM 800 but with the speaker poles removed, and with this marvelous building intact, still aesthetically fresh. The congregation has had its struggles with a bad egg and garden-variety hypocrite who siphoned off maybe $100K to pay his own bad bets and Disneyland vacations, but it looks to recover. I hope so.